The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  At Bowling Green station, Transit Patrolman Severino was so close to the edge of the platform that Pelham One Two Three actually brushed him back, leaving an imprint of dust and grime on his uniform. He looked directly into the cab, and his report, when he radioed headquarters, was so concise and disinterested that it left no doubt of its plausibility.

  “Nobody in the cab. Repeat, nobody in the cab. Window busted out and nobody in the cab.”

  DCI DANIELS

  The scene kept shifting in DCI Daniels’ head, the way it did when you were catnapping. One moment he was back on Ie Shima with his old division—good old Statue of Liberty, good old 77th—and the Jap navy were bombarding the hell out of them, and his buddies were screaming as they were hit. Next moment he was in a subway tunnel, feeling the rank wind touching his face.

  But mostly he was walking his old beat. Third Avenue, in the Thirties, it was. Still plenty of Irish around, but the Armenians predominated. Doc Bajian, in the drugstore. Menjes, the grocer. Maradian in the Near East Food Store—couldn’t eat that stuff, too spicy, too many powders. No, Menjes was a Greek…. There were the rows of crosses, a few familiar names, in the white sunlight of Ie Shima. No again. That was a picture he had seen in a magazine once, graves of the brave GI’s of the 77th who had died on Ie Shima…. He was bleeding from a wound on his forehead. Nothing serious, didn’t even hurt. Jap gun butt had grazed him?

  A man was walking along the street in front of him. He frowned and quickened his pace. He was on the track, in the tunnel, and ahead of him a man walked slowly southward on the roadbed between the local tracks. He knew every last soul on the beat by sight. Didn’t recognize this man. Didn’t like the way he walked. What was he doing here late at night? Not doing anything suspicious, but the old instinct was at work, the old cop’s instinct that smelled out the troublemaker. Catch up and check him out.

  Man on the tracks. Holding something. A gun? Could be a gun. Nobody could be allowed to have a gun on his beat, beat of a bright, ambitious cop who was going to climb all the way up to rank of DCI. He slipped his own gun out of the holster. Saw the man stop. Look down. Start to bend over somebody….

  “Hey! Freeze right there! Drop that gun!”

  The man whirled, in a crouch, and the DCI saw muzzle flash. He returned fire, and the thunder of the gun through the silent midnight streets cleared his head and oriented him. He was shooting it out with a gunman who had broken into Paulie Ryan’s saloon….

  RYDER

  Ryder had no last thoughts. He died instantaneously, with a metallic taste on his tongue, from a .38 caliber round that entered just below his chin, smashed his teeth and palate, and curved upward through the roof of his mouth into his brain.

  DCI DANIELS

  Some shooting, DCI Daniels thought, good as thirty-five years ago, when he killed the armed man who tried knocking over Paulie Ryan’s saloon. His first commendation for it, not to mention Paulie sending him a full case of whiskey every Christmas for over fifteen years until he passed away and his educated son took over with his high-hat ideas and no sense of carrying on his father’s obligations.

  Funny that he had just done it all over again. And what was he doing in a subway tunnel?

  He moved up on the fallen gunman, who lay face up, his eyes open and staring at the tunnel roof. Tunnel? The DCI bent over the gunman, not that there was much to see—a dead, neatly dressed man with a ruined bloody face. Well, this one would do no more felonies, nor try shooting it out with a police officer.

  He turned to the victim, poor thing. Bloody, too, but alive. Lustrous blond hair down to the shoulders, bare toes in open sandals a bit grimy, but that was the city pavement for you. He knelt and said in a gentle, comforting voice, “We’ll have an ambulance along in a jiffy, miss.”

  The face screwed up, the eyes narrowing, the lips parting, and the DCI bent closer to catch a whisper. But instead of words there was laughter, surprisingly booming and hearty to come from such a young girl.

  TWENTY-THREE

  CLIVE PRESCOTT

  Prescott didn’t understand how a train could be driven without a motorman’s hand on the deadman’s feature, but he did understand the urgency in Lieutenant Garber’s voice. He dropped the phone and, already shouting, ran across the floor to Correll.

  “Nobody driving the train!” He was screaming into Correll’s face. “Have to stop it!”

  Correll said, “A train can’t drive all by itself.”

  “It is driving itself. They doped the controller somehow; it is driving itself. Don’t argue. It’s nearly to South Ferry, and it’ll loop back to Bowling Green and smash into the rear of the train that’s standing in the station. Can you turn a signal red and trip it? Hurry, for God’s sake!”

  “Christamighty,” Correll said, and Prescott saw that he had become a believer. “Tower can trip it if there’s time.” He whirled toward the console, and just then Nevins Street Tower came in on the squawk box.

  “Pelham One Two Three just cleared South Ferry Station, going strong at about thirty, headed toward loop….”

  Prescott groaned. But Correll, unaccountably, was suddenly grinning. “Don’t worry. I’ll stop the son of a bitch.” His grin broadened as he rolled up his sleeves in dumb show, waved his hands in the air and said, “Presto! Pelham One Two Three, the desk trainmaster commands you to stop!”

  Prescott threw himself at Correll and began to choke him.

  It required all four of Correll’s dispatchers to pry his fingers from Correll’s neck, and reinforcements to bring him down and pin him to the floor. Then, with three men sitting on him and two more holding his threshing arms, they told him about the time signal.

  “There’s a timer in the loop,” a white-haired dispatcher with a dead cigar in his mouth said calmly. “If a train hits the curve too fast, like this one will do, already has, the signal turns red and activates the trippers and the train brakes and stops.”

  Lying back in his chair, the center of another small group, Correll, clutching his throat, was croaking hoarsely.

  “He knew it,” the white-haired man said, nodding toward Correll. “He was just making a little joke.”

  Prescott’s rage was damped down, but not quite extinguished. “That’s why I tried to choke him,” he said. “I can’t stand his little jokes.”

  BOROUGH COMMANDER

  “Controls doctored, nobody in the cab?” The borough commander yelled back at the radio voice, repeating its message.

  “Yes, sir. That’s correct, sir.”

  The borough commander leaned toward the driver. “Back to Union Square. Open it up, break the speed laws.”

  As the car turned right, cornering on two wheels, he said to the commissioner, “Should have known better than to deny a hunch. They’re back there.”

  “Were,” the commissioner said. “They took us in, Charlie.”

  “Speed. More speed,” the borough commander yelled.

  “There’ll be a dozen cars there ahead of us,” the commissioner said. “They’ll be too late, too.”

  The borough commander smashed his fists together, spraining his left wrist and shattering two knuckles.

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  Somebody was cursing the old man, and by the time Anita Lemoyne glanced over her shoulder to see what was happening, at least a dozen of the passengers had broken for the rear of the car. The theater critic was still jammed up against her, but all of a sudden he was at half-mast, and then he was no mast at all. He muttered something and was gone. She watched him walk to the rear of the car.

  The old man was sitting with his head bowed, his lips trembling. What the hell was he crying about, him and his no-show red lights—didn’t he have a long enough life? Next to him, the militant spade was sitting very straight, his chin up, his long legs crossed and one foot casually swinging. Okay. At least he would go in style. Him and me, a proud doomed black stud and a piece of aging white ass. Oh, yes, and the old wino, still asleep, still drooling, sitting in filth and sti
nk and dreaming of her next bottle. Some trio.

  The car rattled into South Ferry station and the by now familiar scene of fist-shaking people on the platform. They swept by into the dimness of the tunnel. Now what? Ahead, she saw the tunnel wall curve, and she knew what. They were going too fast to make it. The wheels would leap off the track, the train would smash into the wall, the pillars… She braced her feet wide apart, and directly ahead was a red signal, with a white light underneath it. Well, the old man was right, after all. But it was too late, they were hitting the curve….

  She felt a terrific drag under her feet and she was thrown forward against the window. There was a hissing sound, and screams from the rear of the car. But through the window everything was running down, tracks, pillars, walls… The car lurched to a full stop.

  From stunned silence the rear of the train exploded into a hysterical chorus of joy, and Anita thought: Well, folks, we’ll all live to fuck another day. She turned and sagged against the door. The old man was looking at her, trying to smile.

  “Well, young lady, didn’t I say we would stop?”

  The militant spade took the bloodstained handkerchief from his face and put it into the old man’s hand. “Better burn this, dude, it’s got nigger blood on it.”

  The wino lady belched and opened her eyes. “’s Forty Secon’?”

  Punch line, Anita thought, the old bum came up with the punch line. She opened her purse and dropped a ten-dollar bill in the spread lap with its ragged layers of wildly mismatched clothing.

  LONGMAN

  Through the emergency exit grating, Longman heard the sounds of the city. As he started to push upward a foot came down directly over his hand, and he recoiled. The foot moved on. He edged up further on the ladder and pushed at the grate with both hands. The grate squealed on rusty hinges, and a cloud of gritty particles showered down on him. But he held fast to the grate and walked up with its weight. When his head reached the level of the sidewalk, he heard shots behind and below him. He froze for an instant, then continued upward. He stepped out to the street level.

  Facing the park wall, his back to the sidewalk, he lowered the grate slowly and didn’t release it until it was an inch off the ground. It settled in place with a clang and a rising of dust. Several passersby glanced at him, but none stopped or even looked back. The famous New York indifference, he thought exultantly, and crossed to the east side of the street and into the stream of pedestrians flowing past Klein’s. Ahead, near Seventeenth Street, he saw a police car. It was doubleparked, and a man was leaning on the window, talking to one of the cops. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he quickened his pace and turned the corner into Sixteenth Street. He forced himself to slow down as he walked eastward. At Irving Place he turned left, crossed the street, and walked past the weathered colorless brick pile of Washington Irving High School. A small group of kids was hanging around the entrance—a heavily lipsticked Chinese girl in a very short miniskirt, a black girl, and two black boys in leather coats.

  As he went by, one of the boys fell in beside him. “Man, can you unload two bits on a deserving student?”

  Longman brushed by the outstretched palm. The boy muttered something and dropped back. Longman walked on. Ahead was the grillwork fence and stripped trees of Gramercy Park. He thought of Ryder, and remembered the shots he had heard as he climbed the emergency ladder. Ryder would be okay, he told himself, and, with an odd reluctance to dwell on the matter, put it out of mind. He turned eastward on Eighteenth Street.

  He crossed Third Avenue, then Second, with the massive pink buildings of Stuyvesant Town dominating the view. Then he was at his own building, the drab stone tenement with the grayed-down façade and scarred entry, and, at the windows, people and dogs gazing out, identically wistful and bored. He climbed the stairs, past blind impermeable doors, to the second floor. He fumbled for his keys, opened the three locks in order from bottom to top, went inside and locked the door, top to bottom.

  He edged through the narrow hallway to the kitchen and turned on the water tap. While he was waiting for the water to run cold, a glass in his hand, he suddenly let out a shout of wild and abandoned triumph.

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  About five minutes after the car had stopped, Anita Lemoyne watched two men climb in through the front door. The first, wearing motorman’s stripes, opened the cab door with a key and went inside. The second was a city cop.

  The cop held up his hands to ward off the passengers who crowded around him and kept saying, “I don’t know nothing about it. We’ll have you off the train in just a few minutes. I don’t know nothing about it…”

  The train started, and in a matter of moments pulled into the lighted area of the Bowling Green station and came to a stop. Anita looked out the window.

  There was a line of cops on the platform, arms linked, holding back a pressing crowd. A man in a conductor’s uniform was bending down at the side of the car with some kind of key in his hand. The doors clattered open. The cops on the platform were overwhelmed. They were tossed aside, borne back, crushed by an irresistible mob of passengers storming their way into the car.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CLIVE PRESCOTT

  Prescott left at six thirty. It was dark, with that washed-down air the city sometimes wore in crisp cold weather, a dark sheen that masked its ugliness. He had doused his head in water, toweled until his skin tingled, but it was no relief for his exhaustion. He looked up at the great dignified buildings the borough had inherited from its past, deserted, glowing palely with night-lights. The lawyers and lawmakers and judges and politicians had fled. There was no more than a sprinkling of people on the streets, and soon these too would disappear, leaving only drunks and muggers and the homeless, prey and hunter.

  On Fulton Street, the stores were closed or closing, and soon the whole shopping area—which the disinherited, people of his own race and the parvenu Puerto Ricans, had inherited from those who preferred losing it to sharing it—would be deserted, too. The department stores were barricaded, their watchmen alert, their burglar alarms set for intruders. A newspaper vendor was closing up her stand, a weathered woman of some fantastic age and durability. He averted his eyes from the giant newspaper headlines.

  A black boy, grand in a cowboy hat and red buckskin coat, thrust something in his face. “Panther paper, Brother.”

  He shook his head and moved on. The boy fell in step. During the day, the streets were lined with young blacks selling the Panther paper. He had rarely seen anybody buy one. Maybe they sold to each other. No, he said to himself sharply, don’t knock it. You got anything better to believe in?

  “Come on, man, get to know what it’s all about. You want to go on being Charley’s field hand?”

  He pushed the paper away roughly. The boy glared at him. Prescott walked on, then stopped.

  “I’ll take one.”

  “Right on.”

  He tucked the paper under his arm. Across the street, a record store, its gate closed, its lights dimmed, blared hard rock through a speaker in the transom. Had the owner forgotten to turn it off? Would that hammering bass and those rubbery voices go on all night and pollute even the stillness of dawn?

  I am sick, Prescott thought, sick of cops and criminals and victims and bystanders. Sick of anger and of blood. Sick of what happened today and will happen tomorrow. Sick of white and of black, of my job and my friends and my family, of love and of hatred. Above all, I am sick of myself, sick of being sick at the imperfections of the world that nobody would try to fix up even if they knew how.

  If only he had grown three inches taller. If only he had had a good outside shot. If only he were white. Or truly black.

  The one thing nobody could ever take away from him was the way he had been able to drive. He was fearless coming down the middle with the ball, contemptuous of the big men who lay in wait to clobber him when he was in the air, suspended, with the ball already arching toward the basket. BOOM! But he came in every time, long, stretching ste
ps, loping into the wall of waiting big boys….

  He crumpled the Panther paper into a crude ball, crouched, wheeled, drove, and released a graceful hook shot at a storefront sign. Two points. A derelict, leering, clapped his hands, then shoved out a grimy palm. Prescott pushed by.

  Tomorrow he would feel better. But the day after tomorrow and the next day? Never mind. Tomorrow he would feel better because there was no way he could feel worse. Good enough.

  DETECTIVE HASKINS

  Detective Second Grade Bert Haskins, who, his Englishy name to one side, was one hundred proof Irish, had once regarded detective work as the most glamorous available to man. For about a week. Then, disabused of every notion he had ever entertained about brilliant deductive reasoning, mano a mano confrontations with vicious criminals, and matching wits with masterminds, he buckled down to the real job of criminal detection: plodding and patience. Detective work was legwork, was interrogating a hundred blind leads in the hope of coming up with a live one, was climbing stairs, ringing doorbells, dealing with frightened, belligerent, closemouthed or dunder-headed citizens. Detective work was based on the law of averages. True, now and then you picked up a useful tidbit from a stoolie, but mostly you plugged. And plugged. And plugged.

  The Transit Authority files had already yielded over a hundred names of employees who had been discharged for cause, and the delving would continue into the night. Most often the cause had nothing even remotely to do with criminal activity. Nevertheless, it had to be assumed that every discharged employee had reason to be disgruntled. Disgruntled enough to hijack a subway train? That was another matter. But how could you find out if you didn’t plug?

  Three of the hijackers had been shot to death. A quarter of a million dollars each had been recovered from money jackets worn by two of them. That left one hijacker and half a million dollars missing. No official identification had yet been made of any of the dead hijackers, so although it was conceivable that one of them might turn out to be a disgruntled former TA employee, that didn’t eliminate the missing fourth man.